Information Retrieval Technology: 15th Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2019, Hong Kong, November 7-9, 2019, Proceedings

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Information Retrieval Technology Conference, AIRS 2019, held in Hong Kong, China, in November 2019.The 14 full papers presented together with 3 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The scope of the conference covers applications, systems, technologies and theory aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multimedia data

Research Developments in World Englishes

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Discussing key issues of current relevance and setting the tone for future research in world Englishes, this book provides new perspectives on the diverse realities of Englishes around the world. Written by an international team of established and renowned scholars, it is the inaugural volume in the new series Bloomsbury Advances in World Englishes, dedicated to advancing research in the field. Chapters discuss important topics in contemporary world Englishes research, including de-colonial approaches, emerging varieties in post-protectorates and international uses as communicative events to highlight the globalizing aspect of English as a semiotic code. The book also expands on cultural conceptualizations to investigate the connections between Englishes and localized cultural knowledge and ongoing changes and attitudes towards local forms in multilingual settings. Closing with an examination of how world Englishes and the use of English as a lingua franca could influence the future teaching of Englishes, Research Developments in World Englishes presents a detailed picture of contemporary research approaches and points the way towards exciting future directions

Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks

This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, today’s smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life. Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that information access research is an empirical discipline and that evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example, how the recognition that some documents are more important than others has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as organizers and participants. This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students—anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an evaluation task or even to design and organize one

Research Developments in World Englishes

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Discussing key issues of current relevance and setting the tone for future research in world Englishes, this book provides new perspectives on the diverse realities of Englishes around the world. Written by an international team of established and renowned scholars, it is the inaugural volume in the new series Bloomsbury Advances in World Englishes, dedicated to advancing research in the field. Chapters discuss important topics in contemporary world Englishes research, including de-colonial approaches, emerging varieties in post-protectorates and international uses as communicative events to highlight the globalizing aspect of English as a semiotic code. The book also expands on cultural conceptualizations to investigate the connections between Englishes and localized cultural knowledge and ongoing changes and attitudes towards local forms in multilingual settings. Closing with an examination of how world Englishes and the use of English as a lingua franca could influence the future teaching of Englishes, Research Developments in World Englishes presents a detailed picture of contemporary research approaches and points the way towards exciting future directions

Laboratory for Atmospheres 2009 Technical Highlights

The 2009 Technical Highlights describes the efforts of all members of the Laboratory for Atmospheres. Their dedication to advancing Earth Science through conducting research, developing and running models, designing instruments, managing projects, running field campaigns, and numerous other activities, is highlighted in this report

Geographic information extraction from texts

A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction

Remoulding the Chinese mind : mental hygiene promotion in Republican Shanghai

In this thesis, I uncover the history of the Mental Hygiene Movement in Republican Shanghai. I show that it had a far-reaching role to play in the city, promoting mental hygiene throughout China and influencing other cities like Canton, Peking, and Chongqing. This movement could be dated from the 1910s but achieved a dramatic expansion in the 1930s before being attenuated in warfare in the 1940s and coming to an end with the foundation of the PRC. Chinese intellectuals and foreign missionaries and experts, despite their different aims, jointly promoted this movement, and it reached out to the Chinese populace through the public media. Mental hygiene arose from the conjuncture of a new understanding toward the mind and mental problems, the establishment of asylums and psychiatric hospitals, new tools of mass publicity available to the government and a range of non-governmental institutes. In addition, development in Shanghai was powerfully shaped by politics and ideology. Initially, mental hygiene emerged in relation to a colonial aim of regulating the unwanted on streets and creating public hygiene and order. Subsequently, Shanghai would increasingly see a strong revolutionary and political influence in remoulding the ‘national’ mind. In particular, nationalism and modernism were powerful factors in development. More generally, the progressive ideology of scienfication lay behind the development of disciplines and clinics. Shanghai was part of the international history of mental hygiene, but it also demonstrates the importance of locality. For both Chinese governments and the populace, the significance of the Mental Hygiene Movement was more symbolic than pragmatic. The ideological project of remoulding the mind outweighed medical research and the treatment of mental illnesses. I argue that the reason psychiatric policies were not facilitated in China on a large scale was due to the lack of a powerful government force. The acceptance of mind remoulding and self-improvement, however, was more pervasive. One reason for this was that it benefited from the inheritance of a tradition of self-introspection. The Chinese Mental Hygiene movement, therefore, reflected novelty and Western influence but also a convention. Intellectual radicalism was questioned in the process of popularisation and was modified to become more pragmatic in line with everyday practices. Traditional thinking about the mind, while under fierce critique from the modernisers, showed resilience in compromising and integrating new knowledge and ideologies

Recent Advances in Social Data and Artificial Intelligence 2019

The importance and usefulness of subjects and topics involving social data and artificial intelligence are becoming widely recognized. This book contains invited review, expository, and original research articles dealing with, and presenting state-of-the-art accounts pf, the recent advances in the subjects of social data and artificial intelligence, and potentially their links to Cyberspace

Mooring the global archive: a Japanese ship and its migrant histories

Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. His compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it? This title is also available as Open Access